Regarding the John and Elizabeth Edwards announcement, I have  
something related to add. On the Sunday following the announcement,  
Katie Couric interviewed them on 60 Minutes.  Couric was relentlessly  
accusatory towards them, as if the decision to continue with the  
campaign was cold-hearted and driven by ambition. Each time John and  
Elizabeth Edwards offered an answer they were remarkably  
straightforward, and even reminded Katie Couric that we're all going  
to die and we never know when, so no one can afford to live peeking  
over their shoulders looking for the grim reaper. Elizabeth Edwards  
also said that, even facing a cancer diagnosis, she thought it was  
better for her to embrace life than embrace the disease. They were  
quite eloquent, but Couric continued with her "some people say..."  
questions, all of which were prosecutorial.

I thought the Edwardses handled the situation gracefully and without  
any bristle at the barrage, but thought Couric had acted strangely,  
perhaps because she herself had a husband who died of cancer, and her  
own feelings may have tainted her journalistic judgement.

A day or two later I noticed an article on the New York Times  
website, which was about a furor that was erupting over Couric's  
behavior and line of questioning. Times online readers were invited  
to chime in with their thoughts about this.  There was a large number  
of comments, mostly critical of Couric.  I added one of my own as  
well.  A day later, when I looked to see whether my intervention had  
been "approved" and added to the discussion, I discovered that the  
online piece and the commentaries had disappeared from the site. When  
I searched for it on the Times' site search engine, nothing came up.  
The only piece left was an Associated Press article, much briefer and  
without any commentary.

I find it odd that the "Paper of Record" seems to have removed  
interchange from the record. It was particularly strange because some  
of the commentary noted that the Edwards campaign, the most left of  
the front runners, has been virtually ignored by the mainstream  
media, including the Times. It was only when cancer entered the  
picture, and doubts about the campaign continuing arose, that  
coverage began to grow. Once that had passed, the Edwards campaign  
(as opposed to Clinton/Obama, who continue to be covered as if they  
are the only contenders) has virtually disappeared again.  Even a  
public discussion about how the cancer story was framed on 60  
minutes, and the political implications of that, seems to have been  
expunged from the record.

All the news that fits. I guess they ran out of space on their server.

If anyone can locate this public discussion on the Times site, please  
let me know. I will retract my line of questioning and apologize to  
the New York Times for raising this issue.

AB

On Mar 30, 2007, at 10:12 AM, Peter Parisi wrote:

> Responding to a suggestion from Buddy Stein, I am forwarding this
> interesting discussion of what can happen when mainstream media use
> blogs as authoritative information sources. It appeared only on IMA-L
> and applies directly to members of this list. -- Peter Parisi
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Gorelick, Steve <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mar 24, 2007 5:11 PM
> Subject: [IMA] When Mainstream Media Use Blogs as Sources Without  
> Attribution
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
>
>
> When John Edwards and his wife announced the recurrence of her cancer,
> I asked two of my classes to follow the subsequent coverage given that
> we are reading Susan Sontag's seminal essays "Illness as Metaphor" and
> AIDS and Its Metaphors." Sontag is concerned with the language and
> metaphor we use to talk about illnesses like cancer, and with what our
> linguistic choices reveal about deeply held attitudes.  We also have
> been examining how people actually dealing with cancer negotiate a
> cultural environment and mass media saturated with vocabulary and
> ideology implying that cancer is inevitably catastrophic.
>
>
>
> As I sat in my office reading all the breaking news bulletins, it
> became clear that someone had it wrong. Some mainstream networks were
> reporting that Edwards was suspending his campaign, some said he was
> ending it, and others said he was continuing. (Some of you may
> remember that Edwards visited Hunter last year, met with a number of
> our students, and held several seminars.)
>
>
>
> What happened?
>
>
>
> The explanation turns out to be more than a little embarrassing for
> the newspapers and television networks that, by and large, have
> expressed great skepticism about blogs as reliable news sources. For
> the most part they have decried the lack of editing and the lack of
> fact checking. You can trust The New York Times, they argue, but why
> and how can you trust some kid in Topeka using Wordpress.
>
>
>
> As you will see in the AP story below, a number of the biggies were
> relying on a blog as their sole source when they went with the story
> that Edwards was suspending his campaign.
>
>
>
> I want to be careful not to draw too much from this.  One story does
> not prove anyone's argument about either the influence or the accuracy
> of the blogosphere. In this case the blog was wrong, as were the
> networks that took blog report at face value and reported it without
> attribution. Sometimes the mainstream media and some of my favorite
> newspapers blow it badly. What this does reveal, however, is that –
> with all their dismissals of blogs – the "biggies" are willing to base
> a fairly big story on the very blog-based sources that they have
> complained cannot be monitored for accuracy.
>
>
>
> Last August Columbia J-School Dean Nicholas Lemann wrote a fairly
> condescending piece in the New Yorker called "Amateur Hour" that
> cautioned about relying on blogs. While some of Lemann's concerns
> about quality and editing and accuracy can't be easily dismissed (in
> any medium), it now seems clear that – whatever the mainstream media
> is publicly saying about blogs -- what they are doing with them is
> reading them, using them, and basing stories on them. Given the AP
> story below, it is at least fair to wonder how many other examples
> there are of blog-reporting being used without attribution.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Web site apologizes for Edwards report
>
> By David Bauder, AP Television Writer  |  March 22, 2007
>
>
>
> NEW YORK --A reporter for the new Politico Web site apologized for
> reporting that John Edwards was suspending his campaign for president
> more than an hour before Edwards said Thursday he was staying in the
> race.
>
>
>
> The incorrect report rocketed through the media before Edwards held
> his news conference announcing the recurrence of his wife's cancer.
> Some outlets used Politico's information; others steered clear.
>
>
>
> Ben Smith, a former New York Daily News reporter, posted the report on
> his Politico Web log at 11:06 a.m. EDT. Quoting but not identifying
> "an Edwards friend" as his source, Smith reported that Edwards was
> suspending his campaign and may drop out completely because of
> Elizabeth Edwards' cancer.
>
>
>
> "There was never any discussion of suspending the campaign," Edwards
> adviser Jennifer Palmieri said. She said the Edwardses invited about
> half a dozen aides to their home to discuss how best to tell the
> public about her diagnosis and their decision to stay in the race.
>
>
>
> Smith, in a later post titled "Getting it Wrong," explained how he had
> trusted a reliable source he had known for years. But he "unwisely"
> wrote it without getting a second source, he said.
>
>
>
> "When the campaign pushed back harder than I'd expected, I added that
> information to the original item, but that doesn't undo the damage,"
> Smith wrote. "My apologies to our readers for passing on bad
> information."
>
>
>
> The Politico, a Web site with a companion free tabloid distributed in
> Washington, began in January with many respected political
> journalists. It was founded by John Harris and Jim VandeHei, longtime
> Washington Post journalists.
>
>
>
> With news organizations waiting for a news conference that it had
> known about for more than 12 hours without a substantive leak ahead of
> time, Smith's report proved too hard for many to resist.
>
>
>
> CNN cited the Politico report several times before Edwards' news
> conference, but pulled back when correspondent Candy Crowley said
> Edwards staffers were casting doubt on it.
>
>
>
> While MSNBC did not cite the report on television, the Web site
> MSNBC.com ran the information as a banner headline. MSNBC.com later
> apologized, saying it had relied on Politico "and a source who spoke
> to NBC."
>
>
>
> CBS News, which has a partnership agreement with Politico, posted the
> report on the CBS Web site without doing its own reporting, and later
> corrected it, a spokeswoman said.
>
>
>
> NBC News anchor Brian Williams delivered his own correction after the
> network briefly interrupted regular programming for the Edwards news
> conference.
>
>
>
> "When we came on for this special report, we delivered two headlines
> to you. Number one, that Mrs. Edwards' cancer had returned," he said.
> "Sadly, that headline turned out to be correct. The second headline
> was that John Edwards was ending or suspending his campaign for
> president, and as we just heard from the former senator, he said this
> campaign goes on. So that part of this story, at least for now, is
> incorrect."
>
>
>
> ABC News did not cite Politico, either on the air or Web, because its
> own sources were leading the network in the other direction, said Jon
> Banner, executive producer of "World News."
>
>
>
> "The pressure is on to get these things right, especially when it
> concerns someone's health," he said. "There's some sensitivity to
> that."
>
>
>
> Fox News Channel and The Associated Press also did not repeat the
> Politico report, relying on their own reporters.
>
>
>
> Harris, Smith's editor at Politico, was not immediately available for
> comment. But he told Smith in an e-mail that his reporting was worth
> sharing with readers, but only with the caution that the information
> was fragmentary.
>
>
>
> "We should not have made a flat, predictive assertion about what
> Edwards was going to do," Harris wrote. "The lesson, which we both
> know but re-learned, was the importance of precision."
>
>
>
> The incident illustrates the danger faced by Politico, a Web site that
> tries to combine the gossipy aspects of a Web log with the
> authoritativeness of journalists, said Tom Rosenstiel, a former
> political reporter and director of the Washington-based Project for
> Excellence in Journalism.
>
>
>
> "It doesn't have a lot of track record and it's still making first
> impressions," Rosenstiel said. "This not a good first impression."
>
>
>
> ------
>
>
>
> Associated Press reporters Jake Coyle in New York and Nedra Pickler in
> Washington contributed to this report.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Peter Parisi, Ph.D.
> Dept. of Film & Media Studies
> Hunter College
> 695 Park Avenue
> New York, NY 10021
> 212-772-4949
> "The suffering itself is not so bad, it's the resentment against
> suffering that is the real pain." --Allen Ginsberg